Stardust Memories

Yello,

Firstly thanks for a great project! This taught me so much about technique and style and it really gave me a kick in the right direction.

One thing I always struggle with when drawing is just coming up with a good concept, or an idea from nowhere. The course gave me some great insight into this, and helped loosen up my style a bit. Far too often I tend to go for more literal solutions, so one of my personal goals was to create something that was a bit more abstract and loose.

The themes Before / After led me to think about things like time, aging, fading, youth, fragments and memories. Eventually I got to more concrete objects like film spools, hour glasses & eyes. I thought if I used the visual of the film roll paired with more abstract words like perception or memory would lead me to some interesting results.

The film roll is a very concrete representation for the Before / After theme, so I tried to pair this with the idea of memories, maybe the idea of some characters perceiving themselves through the film roll?

I tried to play with different visual representations and techniques of the film rolling out that wasn't too concrete or cliche. I also wanted the characters in the piece to pop out of the frames of the film, like the were looking back on themselves.

I drew a few different characters that i wanted to be in the piece, but found that only two of them fit in the end.

Eventually I started bringing all the elements together and experimented with colour. I wanted it to be a bit dreamy and ethereal. While I was putting the elements together a lot of the scene happened organically, like the old man looking puzzled as he is blinded by a white light. The white light also started resembling a projector beam, bringing together the film theme even more, something i did not intend in the orignal sketches.

I went into pastel territory for a while…

I returned to the pink coloured background, with a scatter of psychedelic green, red and blue. In the end the concept reminded me of the film Stardust Memories by Woody Allen…

I'd love to hear people's opinion on the end result. What part of my process was good / what do you think could be done better? How was my technique, and where do you see areas where I can improve the most? I tried to be as transparent as possible in how i worked so that i could get the proper feedback. Be honest and let me know!